The Way

When were you ever content to stay in just a single

room in your house? You used to poke and

wander into every corner– from the cellar, with

its solitary spiders in their cottony webs, the

rusting saws and hammers and families of mice,

up into the attic, with its treasure of enigmatic

boxes, empty suitcases and someone’s wedding

tux and wedding dress pressed together in a plastic

bag beneath a rain of dust that sifted down like flour

from the rafters.

But then one day you noticed that the walls began to

splinter and collapse. You pulled down the beams one

by one and let the roof cave in. You watched the shingles

burst into the air like a flight of crows. You let the

wind blow the rugs and chairs away, the refrigerator

too. You gave away the doors and windows to

someone in Berlin you thought you loved and the

back porch to the friend in Barcelona, the one whose

hands turned into water every stone that still remained

inside your heart.

When you had finally flattened all the walls and

the house was at last a house no more,

when your fists had finally opened,

then snow poured in and moonlight, and tiny

blackened stones from Dresden, and a storm of leaves

that has been falling for a thousand years.

then you found the path that is no Path, the road that never

was a road, only light that flickers on the sand—or was it water?

Only dancing, and the sound of someone singing.

Only a song.